


Yours for the Having

by katajainen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Smut, Laketown, M/M, Sharing a Bath, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:36:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8872450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katajainen/pseuds/katajainen
Summary: Once in Lake-town, Thorin and Company are offered a chance to refresh themselves. Unintentionally, the company's leader and burglar end up sharing a bath. Things unspoken are brought to light and tensions relieved.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonsir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsir/gifts).



> As much as there is a plot, I'm writing in the book version of Lake-town, i.e. wealthier, comfier, friendlier. But there's not that much of a plot ;)
> 
> ETA: many thanks to [saraste](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Saraste/pseuds/Saraste) for the beta!

To finally be clean, Bilbo decides, after all the spiderwebs, dungeon dust and river water, is an incomparable pleasure. The Master of Lake-town might be an obnoxious sort, but for this bit of bliss that still feels like half-stolen, BIlbo is willing to put up with a fair amount disdain hidden beneath oily compliments.

He leans his head on the linen-covered edge of the wooden tub and closes his eyes. _Peace_. He can linger for a while yet, and let the heat soak down into the marrow of his bones, because for the moment he’s done solving the problems of others. For the moment, no one needs anything from him. He can just be.

Then, of course, as is the way of things, the door opens, and a whiff of cold air steals across his face. He groans. ‘Occupied,’ he calls out without opening his eyes. ‘Not open for renegotiation.’

The door closes. Bilbo counts to ten, looks up and sees Thorin, of all people, standing on the doorstep, neither staying or going. Well, isn’t that something. An unexpected intriguing something. Bilbo sits up and looks Thorin firmly in the eye – and nowhere below that, if he can help it. ‘I was here first,’ he says, ‘and I’m not yet done. So I believe you will either have to leave… or share. Your majesty.’

He never thought Thorin would. But just like that, he sets his clean clothes on a chair, and steps out of what he’s still wearing, as if he had but waited for Bilbo’s say-so.

The man-sized tub is hardly a tight fit for the two of them sitting face to face, but nor is it exactly _private._ Bilbo tries and fails to recover his earlier feeling of bliss: whatever he does, some bit of his skin brushes against Thorin’s, which is… unconducive to relaxation.

Thorin starts soaping up his hair, and Bilbo’s fingers itch to help. He won’t offer, that much he has learned. The dwarves are particular about beards and hair. ‘What next?’ he asks instead, to fill the silence, to distract his thoughts from a heavy wealth of dark hair at an arm’s reach. He catches himself following a trail of foam that slips down one ink-decorated shoulder and swallows against the sudden dryness of his mouth.

‘Rest and heal, while the goodwill lasts.’ Thorin replies, and ducks underwater to rinse. Bilbo flops back against the rim of the tub fast enough to knock his head, stares up into the ceiling and tries hard to think of what will come after, of the presumed dragon at the end of the road. Of anything and everything but what may not be his for the taking.

And he had been a fool of a Took, he had, to invite Thorin to his bath. _You walked right into this_ , he says to himself, _just like the morning you ran out of your door without as much as a handkerchief for the journey_. If he got up and went now, he might just escape with his dignity.

But Bilbo never goes, because Thorin speaks then. ‘What you did, getting us out, was both brave and clever,’ he says, ‘those barrels and the water-gate – I believe I have yet to properly thank you.’ And he looks at Bilbo with those improbable eyes of his, and they’re soft and dark in the firelit room, and Bilbo knows when he has lost. He may have started the game by giving Thorin the choice of staying or leaving, but now he’s as solidly trapped by the gaze on him as if there were a bolt and chain tying him in place.

‘There is no need,’ he hears himself say, a common courtesy, and would curse himself for the sheer inanity of it, except that Thorin’s hand is now on his shoulder, where it barely shows above the water, and Bilbo has this terrible urge to sink into the bath entirely, because he can feel the heat rising on his face at the touch, and he _knows_ it shows, ever since he was a tween he has known a blush on his face is not something he can hide.

But what of it? What if Thorin should see? ‘I’ve been saved many times over,’ Bilbo says, quiet, but yet it seems to echo in the empty room. ‘I have not been keeping books over who owes what to whom. What would you say if I were to call us even?’

‘I would still say you have my thanks,’ says Thorin, and his eyes never leave Bilbo’s, but oh they’re so dark now, an edge of summer-sky blue around a solid winter-night black to sink into. Bilbo finds his breath short and shallow, and his gaze drops from Thorin’s eyes to his parted lips and down, to where brown skin disappears into the soap-clouded water. The hand on his shoulder moves, thumb tracing a simple careful back-and-forth over the skin; Bilbo tilts his head to press his cheek against the back of Thorin’s hand and lets out a sigh. He’s closed his eyes without fully willing it, and relishes in the warmth of Thorin’s skin, soft but for the cold metal and stone of his ring.

The water moves, sloshes and laps against Bilbo’s chest. As the ripples still, he feels a breath over his face, distinct from the staid steam-swollen air hanging about the bath. His eyes flicker open to look into Thorin’s, bare inches away.

Maybe he imagines the softness in the darkened gaze, but when he carefully traces fingertips over one eyebrow, down the line of a cheekbone, over a bearded cheek so strangely soft, even ticklish under his hand, the absence of rejection is no delusion of his; not when Thorin leans into his touch. There’s a peculiar moment of stillness when it feels the balance might yet tip either way, when they’re linked only by the two hands on face and shoulder, and Bilbo would rather not think how his fledgling hope might still fail.

Not when he would rather not think at all. Not when his heart is racing in his chest like a hare across a green-sprouting field in May, not when his lips tingle for a taste that’s yet only in his imagination. When a simple brush of fingers over one bare shoulder is enough to send warm wriggling tendrils of want shooting across his skin from where he had thought such things well locked away until further notice.

Sod it, he thinks to himself. What is the worst that can happen, after all he’s been made to suffer through? He closes the inches that separate them, and finds that while beard does tickle quite strangely, the mouth underneath yields an answer to his question, sweet enough to make his heart skip a beat.

He would like to think time slows down, but all it seems to do is speed up until Thorin leans back with a final slow peck to Bilbo’s lips.

‘Each day,’ he says softly, ‘each day and night I spent under lock and key, before and after you came and spoke to me, I held but a single regret: that I had not held you like this.’

‘I’m afraid I’ll beat you to that,’ Bilbo says, and shifts just that little bit closer in the circle of Thorin’s arms. ‘Remember that first night, Bag End?’ he asks quietly. ‘It was your singing, you see, that moved me then; had you come calling afterwards, you’d have found me yours for the taking.’ Thorin blinks and Bilbo can’t help smiling. ‘But I would have sent you on your merry way come morning,’ he says with a huff at his past self, ‘because then I would have had my taste of adventure, and thought it enough. A pleasant memory for a cold winter’s night, but nothing more.’

Thorin starts to say something, but Bilbo shakes his head. ‘I don’t regret you didn’t. I would not be here now if you had.’ he says, and that’s the end of talking for some while.

It is certainly not the peace and quiet he craved but ten minutes ago, but it’s different to be needed like this. This is no spider’s web to cut, a puzzle of a locked dungeon to solve. To be needed under Thorin’s hands is to be given as well, and what he himself wants is here for the having, not only for wistful dreaming.

At first it seems the warm water has lulled them into a pleasant slowness. Soft, lingering kisses, hands traveling meandering paths over hair, shoulders, hips, thighs. Desire is not a fast-mounting ache, but a gentle glow fanned to full-blown flame by each shared breath, each brush of skin on skin.

Bilbo finds that the black and indigo blue knots and angular swirls do indeed feel different under his fingers than unmarked skin; but those are not the only marks on Thorin, and while Bilbo does not shy away from the scars, he keeps the questions behind his teeth.

Besides, he’s distracted. The long slow caress of Thorin’s hands on his water-slicked skin is pleasant enough, but when the fingers pass into his hair, Bilbo lets his head fall back with a sigh. For each brush of thumbs tracing the rim of his ears creates an echo much lower down, an insistent tug for attention. Thorin tilting his face for a kiss only adds fuel to the fire, the tickle of moustache and beard on his face still a delicious novelty. What little he can move straddling Thorin like this, that seemed plenty enough a few moments past, now feels barely even close to what he needs.

Reluctantly, Bilbo pushes himself away from the kiss. ‘A moment– let me just..’ is the extent of the eloquence he manages as he scrambles to get his knees under him and leans close again.

It’s really quite lovely how well he fits into the open vee of Thorin’s thighs, and yet a different kind of pleasure in Thorin’s gasp when Bilbo grinds down against him, finally with some proper leverage. But a simpler deeper truth, that drags an answering sound of pleasure from Bilbo’s own mouth, is that Thorin feels so bedamned _good_ , wet skin stretched smooth over hard eager heat, and sweet valar have mercy he’s big… were he to get his mouth over that – BIlbo bites his lip at the thought.

‘ _Now_ what’s on your mind?’ And it’s a wonder and delight to hear Thorin so breathless.

‘My mouth on you,’ he replies without thinking.

‘How did you–’ Thorin breathes, and thrusts up to meet him– ‘how did you know that was what I… each night alone I couldn’t stop thinking…’

‘Imagined me on my knees, did you?’ They’re falling into a rhythm now, easy as breathing, easy as if this were not the first time.

‘Yes– my hands… my hands in your hair so I could see your face…’

‘And I would–- would what? Swallow you down? All of you?’

Thorin winks, the bastard. ‘Well– you’re the one with the clever mouth, aren’t you?’

Bilbo falters in his rhythm as he laughs, then groans as he feels a large hand wrap around the both of them, setting a yet faster stroke that soon has blood pounding in his ears. His words fail him then, lest they be ‘yes’ and ‘Thorin’.

The water has long gone tepid when Bilbo comes back to himself. He lifts his head from Thorin’s chest to look up at him, and finds soft half-lidded eyes looking back. And a smile that has been sudden and startlingly rare before is now blooming slow and easy, just for him. Wordless, he brushes an unruly strand of hair from Thorin’s face, the way he has wanted to for weeks on end, and smiles back in bright helpless joy.

They are both mostly dressed, and Thorin is rolling back the too-long sleeves of a borrowed shirt, when Bilbo sneezes.

‘May I suggest a bed might be warmer next time?’ Thorin comments. ‘As it happens, I have a room with one.’

‘Is that an invitation, Mister Oakenshield?’ Bilbo laughs and kisses the corner of his smirk.

‘Only in reply to your own kind request to share the bath, Master Baggins. I have no doubt you could find your way uninvited.’

‘You would have me come and go in your rooms as I please?’

‘Only if it would please to call my rooms and my bed yours.’

Bilbo blinks, steps back and considers that for a moment. Then he comes up to Thorin and places two careful hands against his chest. ‘That is a generous offer.’ he says, finding his level voice. He won’t ask if the offer would include the heart he feels beating under his hands.

‘No more than you deserve. I would have no more regrets.’

Bilbo nods. ‘Yes, I think I could agree to that. All of it.’ A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. ‘But who do you think won the betting pool? I would worry if there wasn’t one going.’

Thorin barks out a laugh. ‘Considering who went out of their way to convince me the bath was unoccupied, I could hazard a guess.’

‘Those two are born meddlers. Are you sure there’s not some hobbit in your family line?’

‘If there’s not, some of the line seem intent on righting the situation.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Bilbo says, and Thorin’s laughter follows them through the door.


End file.
